Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/30

8 writings. He then showed a familiarity with those notions which have been ascribed generally to Mayer and which made the latter famous, and with those ideas which are now usually attributed to Joule with similar result. He seems actually to have planned the very kind of research which Joule finally carried out. All these advanced views must, of course, have been developed by Carnot before 1832, the date of his illness and death, and ten or fifteen years earlier than they were made public by those who have since been commonly considered their discoverers. These until lately unpublished notes of Carnot contain equally well-constructed arguments in favor of the now accepted theory of heat as energy. While submitting to the authority of the greatest physicists of his time, and so far as to make their view the basis of his work, to a certain extent, he nevertheless adhered privately to the true idea. His idea of the equivalence of heat and other forms of energy was as distinct and exact as was his notion of the nature of that phenomenon. He states it with perfect accuracy.

In making his measures of heat-energy, he assumes as a unit a measure not now common, but one which may be easily and conveniently reduced to the now general system of measurement. He